Straight Read online

  The useless thoughts squirreled around and got me nowhere. The gloomiest of them was that someone could have gone looking for Greville’s car at any time since the scaffolding fell, and although I might find the engine and the wheels, the essential cupboard would be bare.

  Annette came into the office carrying a fistful of papers which she said had come in the morning mail and needed to be dealt with—by me, her manner inferred.

  “Sit down, then,” I said, “and tell me what they all mean.”

  There were letters from insurance people, fund-raisers, dissatisfied customers, gemology forecasters, and a cable from a supplier in Hong Kong saying he didn’t have enough African 12mm amethyst AA quality round beads to fill our order and would we take Brazilian amethyst to make it up.

  “What’s the difference?” I asked. “Does it matter?”

  Annette developed worry lines over my ignorance. “The best amethyst is found in Africa,” she said. “Then it goes to Hong Kong or Taiwan for cutting and polishing into beads, then comes here. The amethyst from Brazil isn’t such a good deep color. Do you want me to order the Brazilian amethyst or wait until he has more of the African?”

  “What do you think?” I said.

  “Mr. Franklin always decided.”

  She looked at me anxiously. It’s hopeless, I thought. The simplest decision was impossible without knowledge.

  “Would the customers take the Brazilian instead?” I asked.

  “Some would, some wouldn’t. It’s much cheaper. We sell a lot of the Brazilian anyway, in all sizes.”

  “Well,” I said, “if we run out of the African beads, offer the customers Brazilian. Or offer a different size of African. Cable the Chinese supplier to send just the Af rican AA 12mm he’s got now and the rest as soon as he can.”

  She looked relieved. “That’s what I’d have said.”

  Then why didn’t you, I thought, but it was no use being angry. If she gave me bad advice I’d probably blame her for it: it was safer from her viewpoint, I supposed, not to stick her neck out.

  “Incidentally,” she said, “I did reach Prospero Jenks. He said he’d be in his Knightsbridge shop at two-thirty today, if you wanted to see him.”

  “Great.”

  She smiled. “I didn’t mention horses.”

  I smiled back. “Fine.”

  She took the letters off to her own office to answer them, and I went from department to department on a round trip to the vault, watching everyone at work, all of them capable, willing and beginning to settle obligingly into the change of regime, keeping their inner reservations to themselves. I asked if one of them would go down and tell Brad I’d need him at two, not before. June went and returned like a boomerang.

  I unlocked the vault and started on topaz: thousands of brilliant translucent slippery stones in a rainbow of colors, some bigger than acorns, some like peas.

  No diamonds.

  After that, every imaginable shape and size of garnet, which could be yellow and green, I found, as well as red, and boxes of citrine.

  Two and a half hours of unfolding and folding glossy white packets, and no diamonds.

  June swirled in and out at one point with a long order for faceted stones which she handed to me without comment, and I remembered that only Greville and Annette packed orders from the vault. I went in search of Annette and asked if I might watch while she worked down the list, found what was needed from twenty or more boxes and assembled the total on the shelf. She was quick and sure, knowing exactly where to find everything. It was quite easy, she said, reassuring me. I would soon get the hang of it. God help me, I thought.

  At two, after another of June’s sandwich lunches, I went down to the car and gave Prospero Jenks’s address to Brad. “It’s a shop somewhere near Harrods,” I said, climbing in.

  He nodded, drove through traffic, found the shop.

  “Great,” I said. “Now this time you’ll have to answer the car phone whether you like it or not, because there’s nowhere here to park.”

  He shook his head. He’d resisted the suggestion several times before.

  “Yes,” I said. “It’s very easy. I’ll switch it on for you now. When it rings pick it up and press this button, SND, and you’ll be able to hear me. OK? I’ll ring when I’m ready to leave, then you just come back here and pick me up.”

  He looked at the telephone as if it were contaminated.

  It was a totally portable phone, not a fixture in the car, and it didn’t receive calls unless one switched it on, which I quite often forgot to do and sometimes didn’t do on purpose. I put the phone ready on the passenger seat beside him, to make it easy, and hoped for the best.

  Prospero Jenks’s shopwindow glittered with the sort of intense lighting that makes jewelry sparkle, but the lettering of his name over the window was neat and plain, as if ostentation there would have been superfluous.

  I looked at the window with a curiosity I would never have felt a week earlier and found it filled not with conventional displays of rings and wristwatches but with joyous toys: model cars, airplanes, skiing figures, racing yachts, pheasants and horses, all gold and enamel and shining with gems. Almost every passerby, I noticed, paused to look.

  Pushing awkwardly through the heavy glass front door, I stepped into a deep carpeted area with chairs at the ready before every counter. Apart from the plushness, it was basically an ordinary shop, not very big, quiet in decor, all the excitement in the baubles.

  There was no one but me in there and I swung over to one of the counters to see what was on display. Rings, I found, but not simple little circles. There were huge, often asymmetric, all colorful eye-catchers supreme.

  “Can I help you?” a voice said.

  A neutral man, middle-aged, in a black suit, coming from a doorway at the rear.

  “My name’s Franklin,” I said. “Came to see Prospero Jenks.”

  “A minute.”

  He retreated, returned with a half smile and invited me through the doorway to the privacies beyond. Shielded from customers’ view by a screening partition lay a much longer space which doubled as office and workroom and contained a fearsome-looking safe and several tiers of little drawers like the ones in Saxony Franklin. On one wall a large framed sign read NEVER TURN YOUR BACK TO CUSTOMERS. ALWAYS WATCH THEIR HANDS. A fine statement of no trust, I thought in amusement.

  Sitting on a stool by a workbench, a jeweler’s lens screwed into one eye, was a hunched man in pale pink and white striped shirtsleeves fiddling intently with a small gold object fixed into a vise. Patience and expert workmanship were much on view, all of it calm and painstaking.

  He removed the lens with a sigh and rose to his feet, turning to inspect me from crown to crutches to toecaps with growing surprise. Whatever he’d been expecting, I was not it.

  The feeling, I supposed, was mutual. He was maybe fifty but looked younger in a Peter Pan sort of way; a boyish face with intense bright blue eyes and a lot of lines developing across the forehead. Fairish hair, no beard, no mustache, no personal display. I had expected someone fancier, more extravagant, temperamental.

  “Grev’s brother?” he said. “What a turn-up. There I was, thinking you’d be his age, his height.” He narrowed his eyes. “He never said he had a brother. How do I know you’re legit?”

  “His assistant, Annette Adams, made the appointment.”

  “Yes, so she did. Fair enough. Told me Grev was dead, long live the King. Said his brother was running the shop, life would go on. But I’ll tell you, unless you know as much as Grev, I’m in trouble.”

  “I came to talk to you about that.”

  “It don’t look like tidings of great joy,” he said, watching me judiciously. “Want a seat?” He pointed at an office chair for me and took his place on the stool. His voice was a long way from cut-glass. More like East-end London tidied up for West; the sort that came from nowhere with no privileges and made it to the top from sheer undeniable talent. He had the confident manner of l
ong success, a creative spirit who was also a tradesman, an original artist without airs.

  “I’m just learning the business,” I said cautiously. “I’ll do what I can.”

  “Grev was a genius,” he said explosively. “No one like him with stones. He’d bring me oddities, one-of-a-kinds from all over the world, and I’ve made pieces ...” He stopped and spread his arms out. “They’re in palaces,” he said, “and museums and mansions in Palm Beach. Well, I’m in business. I sell them to wherever the money’s coming from. I’ve got my pride, but it’s in the pieces. They’re good, I’m expensive, it works a treat.”

  “Do you make everything you sell?” I asked.

  He laughed. “No, not myself personally, I couldn’t. I design everything, don’t get me wrong, but. I have a workshop making them. I just make the special pieces myself, the unique ones. In between, I invent for the general market. Grev said he had some decent spinel, have you still got it?”

  “Er,” I said, “red?”

  “Red,” he affirmed. “Three, four or five carats. I’ll take all you’ve got.”

  “We’ll send it tomorrow.”

  “By messenger,” he said. “Not post.”

  “All right.”

  “And a slab of rock crystal like the Eiger. Grev showed me a photo. I’ve got a commission for a fantasy. Send the crystal too.”

  “All right,” I said again, and hid my doubts. I hadn’t seen any slab of rock crystal. Annette would know, I thought.

  He said casually, “What about the diamonds?”

  I let the breath out and into my lungs with conscious control.

  “What about them?” I said.

  “Grev was getting me some. He’d got them, in fact. He told me. He’d sent a batch off to be cut. Are they back yet?”

  “Not yet,” I said, hoping I wasn’t croaking. “Are those the diamonds he bought a couple of months ago from the Central Selling Organisation that you’re talking about?”

  “Sure. He bought a share in a sight from a sightholder. I asked him to. I’m still running the big chunky rings and necklaces I made my name in, but I’m setting some of them now with bigger diamonds, making more profit per item since the market will stand it, and I wanted Grev to get them because I trust him. Trust is like gold dust in this business, even though diamonds weren’t his thing, really. You wouldn’t want to buy two-to-three-carat stones from just anyone, even if they’re not D or E flawless, right?”

  “Er, right.”

  “So he bought the share of the sight and he’s having them cut in Antwerp as I need them, as I expect you know.”

  I nodded. I did know, but only since he’d just told me.

  “I’m going to make stars of some of them to shine from the rock crystal ...” He broke off, gave a self deprecating shrug of the shoulders, and said, “And I’m making a mobile, with diamonds on gold trembler wires that move in the lightest air. It’s to hang by a window and flash fire in the sunlight.” Again the self-deprecation, this time in a smile. “Diamonds are ravishing in sunlight, they’re at their best in it, and all the social snobs in this city scream that it’s so frightfully vulgar, darling, to wear diamond earrings or bracelets in the daytime. It makes me sick, to be honest. Such a waste.”

  I had never thought about diamonds in sunlight before, though I supposed I would in future. Vistas opened could never be closed, as maybe Greville would have said.

  “I haven’t caught up with everything yet,” I said, which was the understatement of the century. “Have any of the diamonds been delivered to you so far?”

  He shook his head. “I haven’t been in a hurry for them before.”

  “And ... er ... how many are involved?”

  “About a hundred. Like I said, not the very best color in the accepted way of things but they can look warmer with gold sometimes if they’re not ultra blue-white. I work with gold mostly. I like the feel.”

  “How much,” I said slowly, doing sums, “will your rock crystal fantasy sell for?”

  “Trade secret. But then, I guess you’re trade. It’s commissioned, I’ve got a contract for a quarter of a million if they like it. If they don’t like it, I get it back, sell it somewhere else, dismantle it, whatever. In the worst event I’d lose nothing but my time in making it, but don’t you worry, they’ll like it.”

  His certainty was absolute, built in experience.

  I said, “Do you happen to know the name of the Antwerp cutter Grev sent the diamonds to? I mean, it’s bound to be on file in the office, but if I know who to look for ...” I paused. “I could try to hurry him up for you, if you like.”

  “I’d like you to, but I don’t know who Grev knew there, exactly.”

  I shrugged. “I’ll look it up, then.”

  Exactly where was I going to look it up? I wondered. Not in the missing address book, for sure.

  “Do you know the name of the sightholder?” I asked.

  “Nope.”

  “There’s a ton of paper in the office,” I said in explanation. “I’m going through it as fast as I can.”

  “Grev never said a word he didn’t have to,” Jenks said unexpectedly. “I’d talk, he listened. We got on fine. He understood what I do better than anybody.”

  The sadness of his voice was my brother’s universal accolade, I thought. He’d been liked. He’d been trusted. He would be missed.

  I stood up and said, “Thank you, Mr. Jenks.”

  “Call me Pross,” he said easily. “Everyone does.”

  “My name’s Derek.”

  “Right,” he said, smiling. “Now I’ll keep on dealing with you, I won’t say I won’t, but I’m going to have to find me another traveler like Grev, with an eye like his. He’s been supplying me ever since I started on my own, he gave me credit when the banks wouldn’t, he had faith in what I could do. Near the beginning he brought me two rare sticks of watermelon tourmaline that were each over two inches long and were half pink, half green mixed all the way up and transparent with the light shining through them and changing while you watched. It would have been a sin to cut them for jewelry. I mounted them in gold and platinum to hang and twist in sunlight.” He smiled his deprecating smile. “I like gemstones to have life. I didn’t have to pay Grev for that tourmaline ever. It made my name for me, the piece was reviewed in the papers and won prizes, and he said the trade we’d do together would be his reward.” He clicked his mouth. “I do go on a bit.”

  “I like to hear it,” I said. I looked down the room to his workbench and said, “Where did you learn all this? How does one start?”

  “I started in metalwork classes at the local high school,” he said frankly. “Then I stuck bits of glass in gold-plated wire to give to my mum. Then her friends wanted some. So when I left school I took some of those things to show to a jewelry manufacturer and asked for a job. Costume jewelry, they made. I was soon designing for them, and I never looked back.”

  8

  I borrowed Prospero’s telephone to get Brad, but although I could hear the ringing tone in the car, he didn’t answer. Cursing slightly, I asked Pross for a second call and got through to Annette.

  “Please keep on trying this number,” I said, giving it to her. “When Brad answers, tell him I’m ready to go.”

  “Are you coming back here?” she asked.

  I looked at my watch. It wasn’t worth going back as I had to return to Kensington by five-thirty. I said no, I wasn’t.

  “Well, there are one or two things ...”

  “I can’t really tie this phone up,” I said. “I’ll go to my brother’s house and call you from there. Just keep trying Brad.”

  I thanked Pross again for the calls. Anytime, he said vaguely. He was sitting again in front of his vise, thinking and tinkering, producing his marvels.

  There were customers in the shop being attended to by the black-suited salesman. He glanced up very briefly in acknowledgment as I went through and immediately returned to watching the customers’ hands. A busine
ss without trust; much worse than racing. But then, it was probably impossible to slip a racehorse into a pocket when the trainer wasn’t looking.

  I stood on the pavement and wondered pessimistically how long it would take Brad to answer the telephone but in the event he surprised me by arriving within a very few minutes. When I opened the car door, the phone was ringing.

  “Why don’t you answer it?” I asked, wriggling my way into the seat.

  “Forgot which button.”

  “But you came,” I said.

  “Yerss.”

  I picked up the phone myself and talked to Annette. “Brad apparently reckoned that if the phone rang it meant I was ready, so he saw no need to answer it.”

  Brad gave a silent nod.

  “So now we’re setting off to Kensington.” I paused. “Annette, what’s a sightholder, and what’s a sight?”

  “You’re back to diamonds again!”

  “Yes. Do you know?”

  “Of course I do. A sightholder is someone who is permitted to buy rough diamonds from the C.S.O. There aren’t so many sightholders, only about a hundred and fifty world-wide, I think. They sell the diamonds then to other people. A sight is what they call the sales C.S.O. hold every five weeks, and a sightbox is a packet of stones they sell, though that’s often called a sight too.”

  “Is a sightholder the same as a diamantaire?” I asked.

  “All sightholders are diamantaires, but all diamantaires are not sightholders. Diamantaires buy from the sightholders, or share in a sight, or buy somewhere else, not from de Beers.”

  Ask a simple question, I thought.

  Annette said, “A consignment of cultured pearls has come from Japan. Where shall I put them?”

  “Um ... Do you mean where because the vault is locked?”